by Harper, Tim
In fact it was Wavell who told Mountbatten that Nehru was to be treated as a future prime minister of India. When the BMA could find no transport for him, Mountbatten lent his own, and travelled with him. The sight of Nehru by Mountbatten’s side was a political sensation. Nehru’s first engagement was a visit to a welfare centre for Indian troops in Singapore in the company of the Mountbattens. They were mobbed together with Nehru and had to escape. A vital political friendship was born. Nehru was fêted by representatives of all communities. A crowd of 100,000 people gathered outside the Adelphi Hotel where he was staying.99 Tan Kah Kee led a delegation of Chinese and they feasted him at their ‘millionaires’ club’, the Ee Hoe Hean Club. Wherever he stopped, the local MCP representatives came to see him. When confronted by MPAJA veterans, he retorted: ‘Army? You have not come here armed have you?’
Nehru had agreed not to intervene in local politics, but made twenty speeches in eight days to around 60,000 people. His themes were pacific and pan-Asian rather than the specifics of the struggle in Malaya.100 The police were worried that support for the INA would resurface. Guards of honour were provided, and it was agreed that they would not wear INA badges, although many wore their old uniforms: they had no other decent clothes. One of his first acts was to visit the Indian political detainees in jail, dispensing good advice on how to keep body and soul together in prison.101 Congress sent a medical mission under an ex-INA officer that during a ten-week period treated over 17,000 labourers. But there were complaints that some of Nehru’s gifts of clothing did not reach the poor people, for whom they were intended.102 This was one of the last interventions of Congress nationalism in Malayan politics and many local Indians were disappointed by the statesmanlike moderation of the Pandit’s language. At a big rally at Jalan Besar Stadium in Singapore in front of around 10,000 people, including over 3,000 INA personnel, there was a cry of ‘Blood!’ Nehru rebuked the crowd: ‘He agreed that Netaji had done great work, but stated that the fighting spirit called for then was now out of date.’ The veterans in the crowd began to melt away.103 Behind the scenes, in Penang, Indian community leaders gathered to confront him about the fate of the gold that Bose had collected in Malaya. Nehru had been seen as slow in coming to the defence of the INA men on trial at the Red Fort. It was felt that in having cocktails with Mountbatten, Nehru had himself become a ‘sahib’.104
But none of this washed with Dorman-Smith, to whom Dickie – ‘rot him!’ – was the root of all the troubles in Burma because he flattered and built up Aung San. ‘Let’s face it, our Dickie may be a first-class military commander, but he is a damned poor politician. If he ever became Governor General of anywhere I would expect a spot of bother because he just cannot keep his hands off politics… Probably Dickie will get the order of the White Rabbit from the first Government of Free India.’ Dorman-Smith saw plots all around him, most of them originating with Attlee or Mountbatten. He had recently met Edward Gent and felt he was facing similar trouble. Gent told him that there was an agreement between the British government and Ceylon that the colony would have its freedom in five years’ time. ‘I only hope my people [the Burmese] do not get to know of this!’ Dorman-Smith commented. In London, the civil servant to whom this long lament was addressed, Sir David Monteath, minuted loftily that he had a lot of sympathy with Dorman-Smith, even if his letter was ‘phoney’ in parts.
For the time being, the governor thought he had a few cards left to play. He continued to tinker with building a coalition of the old pre-1941 politicians. The friendly rogue, U Saw, was on the way back with his Myochit party. Ba Maw was heading back too, having escaped prosecution in Tokyo,105 while poor old Sir Paw Tun hung on, gamely trying to put the clock back. From Dorman-Smith’s point of view, any of the flotsam and jetsam of the pre-war years was better than the BNA firebrands. Besides, like many other observers, he sensed that Aung San himself did not know what to do, caught as he was between the British and the old guard on the one side and Thakin Soe and the communists on the other. Military intelligence later reported that Aung San was ‘severely terrified of U Saw, who is really dangerous’ and whose return to power was propelled by ‘criminal gangsters’.106 Aung San lived in perpetual fear of assassination but, according to the assessment, ‘has much personal courage, unlike U Saw’. His courage was perhaps not always matched by his judgement; Aung San had poured out his woes to ‘a motherly type of woman’ who just happened to be a British informant: ‘He did not know what to do; all his life he had been without real friends and now everything he tries goes wrong.’ He was ‘beginning to doubt his ability to live up to the position which he has now acquired’, Dorman-Smith paraphrased with satisfaction.107 All the same, the governor was sensible enough to realize that Burmese opinion was largely on Aung San’s side. Burma wanted to ‘gallop down the road without any help’.108 The ‘middle classes’, such as they were, seemed weak and their representatives were likely to be wiped out at the next election. Dorman-Smith had had a ‘heart-warming trip’ up to Myitkyina and the north, where the Kachins and other minority groups remained staunchly pro-British. Yet the minorities could not really provide a bulwark for continued British government in Burma. Though he was often accused of playing divide-and-rule politics, Dorman-Smith was suspicious of a strongly pro-minority stance. Perhaps his Irish background helped here: ‘resistance groups are awkward things to handle as they may go on looking for something to resist’, he wrote, adding that these ‘special arrangements for minority groups only lead to trouble in the long run’.109
Then, quite suddenly, Dorman-Smith began to overplay his hand. In October 1945 he had been prepared to give Aung San the benefit of the doubt and even at his bitterest he still had some time for the man. At the turn of the year, as Aung San’s rhetoric intensified, Dorman-Smith’s tone soured. In mid December Ralph Michaelis, a radical journalist who published an ‘independent newsletter’, reported that the governor was so obsessed by his trial of strength with Bogyoke that he was losing his grip on the fragile administration. Rather than answering Aung San’s charges of delaying Burma’s independence, the governor had chosen to reopen the old Rangoon Yacht Club, a ‘prewar stronghold of the futile snobbery of the British colony in Rangoon to which no Burman was admitted’. Yachts, Michaelis’s pamphlet noted, were once again being built at the club and were being guarded at the expense of the British taxpayer.110 Dorman-Smith’s political touch seems to have been deserting him. His dysentery, which flared up in the miserable conditions of post-war Rangoon, was getting worse. His view of Aung San became darker and darker. By April he was talking about ‘Aung San and his band of thugs’, by whom he meant the rapidly proliferating network of paramilitary People’s Volunteer Organizations. Loosely administered by the AFPFL, the PVOs now effectively controlled large parts of the countryside. Dorman-Smith could almost feel British power draining through his hands into the swamps of the Burmese delta.
As the administration began to lose the propaganda war in Burma, Dorman-Smith searched for a way to stop what he viewed as the country’s slide towards ‘fascism’, a sorely overused term in Burma at the time. One issue on which Aung San seemed to be vulnerable was the persistent rumour that he had murdered a village headman with his own hands during the Burma Independence Army’s advance on Rangoon in early 1942.111 This rumour had been relayed to London in 1945, but had wisely been shelved by the Burma Office. When Dorman-Smith was scouting around for politicians to appoint to his newly constituted executive council in early 1946, he approached Tun Oke, an old rival of Aung San. Tun Oke then used the more public forum of the legislative council formally to accuse Aung San of murder. This was a proceeding of dubious merit, not only because it tied the attack on Aung San to Dorman-Smith’s political manoeuvring, but also because Tun Oke was himself wanted by the American military police for atrocities against Allied troops in 1942. According to one account he had had the heads of three British soldiers cut off and impaled on stakes outside a village, posting a notice beside them
that read: ‘The dirty, cunning English people came to Burma and not only committed the crimes of thieving brigands but cut off the heads of so many of our Burmese people… What I have done is revenge for that.’112 By working with Tun Oke, Dorman-Smith therefore managed to offend not only Aung San’s followers but the British military too. One of Tom Driberg’s correspondents described the reaction: ‘There are several thousand British troops in Burma who are not at all keen on dying to defend a government which is close to such men as Thakin Oke.’ Why, asked Driberg in exasperation, ‘does Labour choose ex-ministers of the Chamberlain government as agents of its colonial policy?’113
Nevertheless, Tun Oke’s allegations against Aung San gained momentum. In March newspapers in Rangoon, India and Britain began to report on the case and the police apparently had some success in digging up pertinent evidence. Determined to rid himself of the troublesome young nationalist, Dorman-Smith wrote to London seeking permission to arrest him. At this stage the British government had not thought through the implications of trying Aung San. While attending a conference in Singapore Dorman-Smith received a note from Whitehall ordering him to proceed with the arrest. He rushed back to Rangoon. The CID was alerted but, at the last minute, a telegram arrived countermanding the order. India had reasserted its primacy again. On 27 March Mountbatten had written to the government of Burma that, although he no longer had any responsibility for Burma, he was deeply perturbed at the proposal to arrest Aung San. Aung San’s antics might have been disturbing but he had ‘played the game by me’ and, given his youth, he was bound to play a major part in Burmese politics for many years to come.114 Three weeks later, as Dorman-Smith was beginning to hope that Mountbatten’s intervention would be ignored, Cripps and Pethick-Lawrence telegraphed Burma urgently from Delhi, where they were on Cabinet Mission duty. They were trying to resolve the increasingly intractable stand-off between the Congress and Muslim League over the structure of a future government of independent India. The Indian issue thrust Burma to the margins. ‘Solely from the point of view of our mission here, we must repeat to you the great risks we see in the arrest of Aung San at this juncture.’115 It would be a ‘disastrous’ move and would derail the whole Indian constitutional process. To a long private letter to Attlee about the Indian deadlock, Pethick-Lawrence added a postscript on the possible arrest of Aung San: ‘My personal feeling is that if we start probing into what happened during the Japanese occupation, we shall stir up mud which may well give us a lot of trouble.’116
The arrest warrant was duly intercepted between the chief secretary and the CID. Another hour and Aung San would have been behind bars. This would almost certainly have been the signal for a mass Burmese uprising against the British which could well have brought about the sort of bloody denouement that the British faced in Indonesia that very year. In Surabaya, they tried to suppress a well-entrenched nationalist movement. Many British and Gurkha soldiers who had survived the campaign against Rommel and the bloody fighting at Imphal and Kohima died for no good reason. In his memoirs Dorman-Smith was unrepentant. This was a nettle that the British had refused to grasp, he insisted. It discouraged the loyal and encouraged illegality. Ultimately, he implied, it set Burma on the path towards authoritarian government.
This attitude was to prove his undoing. The British position was now too weak. As one official put it, it might have been possible to arrest and shoot Aung San a year earlier, but it was too late now. Quite apart from the demands of the Cabinet Mission, the Indian situation frustrated Dorman-Smith at another level. The Indian Army was no longer available to suppress any popular movement that might have developed in response to the detention of Aung San. The Indian authorities had already made it clear that Indian troops could not now be used to put down Burmese nationalists. Congress would not wear it and the Indian Army would anyway probably have mutinied. Watching bitterly from the fringes, Dorman-Smith noted that a meeting of ‘Dickie, Archie [Wavell] and the Auk [Auchinleck]’ in Delhi had decided that the governor of Burma would have to govern in such a way as to avoid a popular uprising. ‘Struth! Old Archie does not seem to be able to manage his show so as to avoid the use of British troops and Indian troops, while friend Dickie seems to be using troops of all sorts in Malaya.’117 This refusal to deploy the Indian Army in Burma was, as he later put it, ‘a bit of a facer’, an insoluble problem, especially as he felt sure that Indians would be among the first to suffer in any AFPFL uprising.118 But he was not ready to give up yet; he still hoped that he could persuade London to go ahead with the arrest and trial of Aung San.
What were the facts about the murder of the headman? Given the years of mayhem in Burma and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, why did it matter so much? The key point was that the man killed by Aung San was a Muslim of Indian descent, one Abdul Rashid, who had been loyal to the British and opposed the nationalists.119 He was headman of a village near Moulmein on the southern coast where tension between Muslims, who were mostly of Indian origin, and Burmese Buddhists had been very high since the Depression. In 1942 the incoming BIA had been immediately drawn into settling local scores as the British fled to the north. In her petition for the trial of Aung San, Abdul Rashid’s widow gave a vivid account of his brutal last days. Denounced by the villagers, he had been thrown into a locked cart with a pig and starved for eight days. Though there is no independent evidence of this, the story’s very existence, with its emphasis on an insult carefully tailored for a Muslim, illustrates the depths of the hatreds involved. Then, the widow continued, Aung San ‘took him to the Thaton football ground and in the presence of thousands of people, speared him to death with his bayonet after crucifying him to the goal post’.120 Aung San did not deny the killing, though he later told Dorman-Smith that he had been incapable of the degree of resolution alleged by the widow. He had certainly intended to kill the man himself, because it was his order that had condemned him, but he had bungled it ‘and almost collapsed after the first stroke’. His subordinates had to finish off the headman.121
In early April, Aung San gave a lengthy response to these accusations in the legislative council.122 The context, he said, was the mass looting and murder which accompanied the BIA’s entry into southern Burma in 1942. He had tried to stop the score settling, but neither he nor Suzuki, the senior Japanese liaison officer with the BIA, had been able to do so effectively. Aung San said that it was important to try to restore order by punishing those who really had been guilty of abuses under the old regime. He claimed that British administration had failed and therefore it was incumbent on the nationalists to form an administration. Besides, ‘in such slave countries as Burma, it cannot be said that conformity with the law is justice’. Abdul Rashid was one who had abused the slave people. He was a ‘wicked man who had ill treated the villagers’ and had indulged in despicable looting ‘for his own stomach’.123 Aung San declared that his conscience was clear, but as he made his statement, he appeared to lose his way, muttering, ‘I forget, I forget…’ He also added: ‘To confess the truth, however, though this measure is not at all regular, yet it was rough and ready justice to suit the time and the conditions prevailing in the country.’ This statement earned him some respect from the more open-minded of the British officials.124
Despite the governor’s desire to act decisively, other British authorities in Burma were in two minds about prosecuting the case. For a start, there were procedural problems. Only six people of the 500 or so present at Abdul Rashid’s killing had come forward to give evidence, and they were all Indians. Also the government doubted its ability to shield Indians from the inevitable reprisal attacks should the case come to trial. Even the archdeacon of Rangoon, George Appleton, who doubled up as the government of Burma’s director of public relations, could partially excuse Aung San. He should perhaps have been ‘arrested and executed’ a year ago, but once Mountbatten had treated him ‘respectfully’, the British had effectively condoned his crimes. His arrest now would have ‘repercussions comparable to
those of the INA trials in India’. Besides, added Appleton, there were racial factors involved: ‘In Burma people do not generally think in terms of justice and reason, but in terms of personalities and relationships.’ Aung San’s crime, and certainly his version of it, was ‘understandable’ and less heinous than many committed during the war, especially given that he was ‘an emotional and in some ways fanatical man’.125
Dorman-Smith, however, refused to relent. This was a struggle of wills between his authority, the AFPFL and London. Once the petition of Abdul Rashid’s widow was in the public domain, he decided on a struggle to the death, effectively handing victory to Aung San. Why was he so inflexible? It was this phase in Dorman-Smith’s career that was to tar him as a Tory reactionary, the character he plays in Aung San Suu Kyi’s memoir of her father and also in Fergal Keane’s 1990s television documentary on Aung San’s assassination. Certainly the Dorman-Smith of 1946 was not the genial Irish observer of nationalist movements who had soothed Tin Tut’s ruffled feathers in Simla three years before. His health was rapidly deteriorating. He was in the grip of his fourth attack of amoebic dysentery since his return to Burma. The season was terrible and conditions were poor even for a governor. He had difficulty in understanding the massive changes that had overtaken Burmese politics since 1942, used as he was to the likes of Paw Tun and U Saw. He was also truly horrified by what was now coming out about Axis atrocities. He was haunted by images of the sook ching massacres of the Chinese in Malaya by the Japanese in 1942, their torture of Major Seagrim and the Karen special forces in 1944, the Burma–Siam railway and, more distantly, the Holocaust. He was horrified by the brutal treatment of the Burmese and Anglo-Indian Christians of Rangoon, among whom he had once felt at home. Aung San and his colleagues were indelibly painted in his mind as JIFS, Japanese-influenced forces, as ‘quislings’ and ‘fascists’. He was also deeply at odds with the Labour ministers in London, pining for his old expansive relationship with his ‘wonderful boss’,126 Leo Amery, rather than the stiff and self-righteous left-wingers who now held power. Attlee’s government seemed to embody dither and interference in about the same degree. Dorman-Smith once drafted a telegram to Attlee: ‘I had a dose of Eno’s [liver salts] last night. May I please be allowed to go to the lavatory tomorrow?’127